Transforming the way this Growth Equity Group identifies its prospects

 

Challenge:

We partnered with a growth equity group to customize a platform to assess, implement, and manage their long-term growth strategies. This firm focuses on acquiring companies in the manufacturing and supply chain industries. These acquisitions often require internal reconciliation, presenting an immediate need to gain further insight into the alignment of the identity and values of prospects.

With business streams ranging from an evaluation and strategic consultant engagement all the way to purchasing the entire entity, they manage multiple relationships at different stages simultaneously and feel the pains of due diligence, implementation, and management being manual and time consuming.

We were asked two main questions:

How can Operations and Management create impact by de-risking opportunities sooner?

Can we track how our process impacts overall ROI?

Additionally, the group needed a way to demonstrate impact to clients, acquisitions, and investors. With each initiative being managed in a silo, it became increasingly difficult to do so efficiently and generate real time accurate reporting with ease.

Solution:

We customized their Journey Strategic Platform to perfectly sync with their processes, completing their onboarding process within 60 days. Our shared goal was to provide a platform in which they could evaluate opportunities efficiently, design and manage a portfolio of strategic plans according to evaluation results, and accelerate growth.  

The platform provides significant improvement in three key areas:

  • A standard for the firm to measure cultural behaviors against

  • The ability to prioritize strategic changes specific to client needs in order to reach reconciliation sooner

  • Demonstrate the impact of both implemented strategies and the acquisitions themselves

In amplifying the due diligence and onboarding processes, we were able to mitigate risk of opportunities, provide a strategy management tool, and deliver the ability to demonstrate and prove impact. 

THEIR CUSTOMIZED JOURNEY SOLUTION

CUSTOMIZATION 1: Better Assessment Reports

Cultural assessments are key when understanding the current state of operational maturity within your prospects. Because this data can be hard to quantify, pinpointing leadership values, identity and capacity alignment among prospective acquisitions can often be left until after the deal has been finalized. These assessments allowed our client to:

  • Identify cultural alignment or lack there of earlier on in the due diligence process

  • Validate and demonstrate “gut feeling” with objective, quantitative data within 3-4 hours

  • Avoid cultural pitfalls and wasted time on ill-fitting opportunities

Compare Manufacturing and Supply Chain Prospects

By uncovering the values and alignment of decision makers with qualitative data, our client was able to accelerate their due diligence process by 3x, identify opportunity earlier, and avoid wasted time.

Can they scale?

Understanding a company’s capacity to change, adapt, and grow, enabled the group to stop using resources on ill-fitting prospects and build applicable strategies for real opportunities instead.

CUSTOMIZATION 2: Implementation & Ongoing Measurement

After streamlining the due diligence process, implementation and ongoing management of multiple strategies was our next focus.

With the Journey Strategic Platform, they now have a strategy builder to input and prioritize strategies across acquisitions and, given the cultural assessments, can predict growth accordingly.

We provided a team chart tool to view leadership of various initiatives, track progress from afar, and have proof of the wins within each business.

Business Standard Created

Creating an organizational standard to measure against, they are now able to prioritize strategies with company goals, varying levels of maturity, and cultural differences in mind.

Operational Overview

With six acquisitions a year, this client needed insight into the management of various initiatives along with the ability to track how the affect on KPI’s.

Manage Ongoing Strategies

Six new businesses a year means integrating and managing a lot of efforts at once. Journey enables them to create, track and alter strategies across their own company or prospective and acquired businesses.

Demonstrate Impact

Proving financial and communal impact without data from before, during and after strategic implementation was a real challenge. The creation of both a home for this data and a designated report generator provides leadership with a way to articulate specifics with ease.

RESULTS:

Our customized a cloud-based platform enabled our client to evaluate, manage, and oversee strategic implementation. Key benefits include:

  • Data-centric cultural assessments generated within 3-4 hours

  • The ability to create, implement and manage strategies across acquisitions at varying maturity levels from one platform

  • Clarity as to “why” KPI’s are being positively or negatively effected

  • Prove the impact of provided resources

We are proud to say the Journey Strategic Platform has revolutionized the way this growth equity group identifies its opportunities and enabled our client to accelerate growth beyond their initial goal of six acquisitions a year. 

 
New Orchard